The
period referred to as the Cold War was inaugurated after the
death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR) and the end
of World War II (hereafter, WW2). The events of the past can
reveal competing and complimenting patterns and meanings and the
many historical narratives in print are proof of this variety.
Regarding the wartime collaboration between the US and USSR,
most historian are in agreement. During World War II, Franklin
Roosevelt and Stalin established an effective working
relationship that seemed to bode well for the prospect of a
stable future, devoid of major confrontations. The agreements
proceeded from the following exchange of promises:

1)The US would provide
loans to the USSR which the latter would use to purchase
American war materiel required to keep Soviet armies in the
field on the Eastern Front. The extension of the "lend lease"
loans for post-war reconstruction was implicit in this
arrangement.

–The US and UK would
open up a second front in Europe in order to relieve the
pressure on Soviet armies and in order to hasten the defeat of
Hitler, the top strategic priority of the Allies ("Hitler
first", i.e. targeting Nazi Germany prior to Imperial Japan).

3)The division of the
spoils would be in accordance with efforts and results in the
field and not necessarily on the basis of pre-war power
division. In practical terms, this reduced Eastern Europe to a
Soviet sphere of influence. It also reduced Western Europe to a
US appendage.

4)Germany would not be
allowed to rebuild itself into a viable industrial and military
power capable of making war against Soviet Russia. Germany would
be required to pay reparations to indemnify the USSR's vast
wartime losses.

It cannot be
denied that the Soviet armies were doing the far greater share
of the fighting and dying in the European theater of war between
1941 and 1943. Hitler had directed his generals to conquer the
USSR after having overrun most of Europe. It is also an accepted
fact that the war in the East had provided the US and UK with a
much needed respite which allowed them to recover from prior
defeats and to mobilize for the final push to dislodge Hitler
from occupied Europe. Only when the Soviet armies succeeded in
turning back the Wehrmacht from the gates of Moscow and
Stalingrad was hope revived for defeating Hitler's armies in
Europe. Only while Hitler's armies were tied down and suffering
reversals of fortune on the battlefields of the Eastern Front
could the US and UK hope to successfully carry out a
cross-channel assault on the European mainland occupied by Nazi
Germany. President Roosevelt was mindful of America's debt to
Stalin and intended to uphold his end of the bargain, though the
same cannot be said of Churchill. Churchill favored putting off
the Normandy invasion, initially scheduled for 1943, to 1944
despite Stalin's pleadings. Churchill also initiated covert
operations in the Balkans to limit Soviet influence while also
meddling in Poland by accepting an anti-Soviet
government-in-exile in London, even though a pro-Soviet
government had been set up in liberated Lublin, Poland.
Additionally, Churchill also favored an exclusive Anglo-American
alliance in determining the division of the spoils of war and
schemed against Stalin. President Roosevelt had rejected these
British machinations in order to avoid giving the impression
that the US and Great Britain were planning to gang up on the
USSR after the conclusion of the war. President Roosevelt also
prevented efforts by disaffected Foreign Service officials to
sabotage lend-lease deliveries to the USSR. Stalin's spies in
the US likely confirmed President Roosevelt’s sincerity to
maintain friendly relations with the USSR during and after the
war. What happened after President Roosevelt died suddenly in
1945 to transform the friendly relations between the US and USSR
and move them into a high state of tension, insecurity and war
preparation known as the Cold War has been the subject of many
treatises.

Though a
definitive answer waits to be written, some historians have
offered updated interpretations based on new information
released from the Soviet archives. One also has a right to
expect more realistic results from historians after the easing
of passions which biased perspectives and judgments along
nationalistic lines for many years, not to mention the release
of archive documents which had been held secret. The purpose of
this paper is to evaluate five historical narratives which
appeared in print between 1996 and 2007:

Specifically, this paper focuses on the answers they provide to
the question how the Cold War arose from a previous period of
relations characterized by collaboration based on mutual trust
and good faith. The first task is to describe how each of the
five contemporary historians have come to make their conclusions
regarding the origins of the Cold War, specifically to answer
what factors led FDR's successor, Harry Truman, to adopt
policies which contravened the former agreements with Stalin.
This section merely summarizes their conclusions or inferences
form the facts they have selected as evidence. Then, an analysis
is offered for how their conclusions may have strayed too far
from the known facts or how the subtraction or addition of other
facts can lead to different conclusions. Finally an effort will
be made to suggest how a collation of the evidence from the
several narratives could better answer the questions which
prompted their individual approaches. By “better” is meant more
truthfully, allowing that the whole truth of a past under
investigation may never be discovered and also that such truths
as can be discovered are merely provisional.

John Lewis
Gaddis

According
to Professor Gaddis, the war-time agreements between Stalin and
FDR regarding Soviet control of Eastern Europe and concessions
in the Mediterranean and Asia should have raised sceptical
eyebrows in Washington since Stalin was intent on expanding
beyond the proposed territorial gains, relying on FDR's trusting
nature and idealism to acquire concessions not warranted by the
USSR's actual power relations with the USA during and
immediately after the war. Gaddis suggests that Stalin's
ulterior motives were shaped not only or even mainly by security
concerns but by a Marxist-Leninist dogma which pitted capitalist
countries against socialist ones as inexorable adversaries.
Stalin, according to Gaddis, had a clear "grand vision" of the
possibilities for collaboration and peace after WW2 and it was
slim to non-existent.[8]
According to Gaddis, Stalin's wartime alliance was a tactical
maneuver designed for appearance and expediency.[9]
Once the danger passed, Stalin intended to pursue a policy of
expansion and world revolution.[10]
Truman and his advisers, unlike FDR and his assistants, were
realists. They recognized Stalin for what he really was -- a
dictator with a blood-lust for dealing with opponents and a plan
for communizing the world under the hegemony of the Soviet
Union. Hence, Truman, the hard boiled politico, was determined
to put Stalin in his place, and that place was not that of a
"junior partner". The actual power relations between the US and
USSR had never supported such an elevated status for the latter
and with possession of atomic bombs the power of the US had far
surpassed that of the USSR, necessitating a break from the
war-time agreements which Stalin never took seriously in the
first place.[11]
The only question that remained was whether to demote Stalin to
a probationary status or to designate him as an outright enemy.
That question was mute in the mind of Professor Gaddis as well
as in the minds of Truman and his advisors since presumably they
had seen the real Stalin behind the collaborative facade.
According to Professor Gaddis, Truman began to question FDR's
commitments to Stalin even before he was certain about the
efficacy of the atomic bomb.[12]
But, after Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been obliterated, Truman
and his advisors sought to force the scheming Stalin to accept
less than was promised by FDR. Due to his perceived power
superiority, Truman maneuvered Stalin into a take-it-or-leave it
position in which the only option was acceptance of a reduction
of the division of the wartime spoils.[13]

If FDR had
accepted Stalin as a "junior partner" during the war, Truman,
according to Gaddis, saw no need to divide the spoils of victory
on the basis of FDR's mistaken assessment of the power ratio
between the US and USSR. Truman believed that possession of the
atomic bomb should produce a conciliatory response from Stalin.[14]
If Stalin insisted on getting what he had been originally
promised then he was overreaching and behaving irrationally --
or bluffing. Either way, he had to be put in his place. Whereas,
FDR had acclaimed the sacrifices and heroism of the Soviet
people, Truman by 1946 began to denounce Stalin as a malevolent
force on the world stage who was bent on undermining world peace
to suit his predisposition for domination through world
revolution. Truman resigned himself to this course of action,
according to Gaddis, even before Forrestal and Kennan and
Clifford and Elsly had provided him with the ideological
rhetoric to attack Stalin.[15]
In professor Gaddis’s narrative of the origins of the Cold War,
the dangers result from an ideology and power-addicted Stalin
who also had a tendency to overreach beyond his capabilities,
thereby posing a threat to the US and the world.

Does
Professor Gaddis present persuasive evidence for his conclusions
about Stalin and the USSR? Actually, no. In fact, he presents no
empirical evidence for his conclusions. It has already been
established that Stalin, unlike Trotsky, was willing to abandon
the call for world revolution for the sake of building socialism
in one country, the Soviet Union. But, apparently, Professor
Gaddis is ignorant of that fact -- or purposely ignores it.
Stalin had also read and quoted favorably Marx and Engel’s
conclusion that America and Britain might forgo a proletarian
revolution as a result of successful labor reforms. Furthermore,
Gaddis’s argument that Stalin was prone to overreaching because
his assessment of actual power relations between the US and USSR
was distorted by either wishful thinking or ideology is simply
silly. Stalin seems to have understood that the USSR was not an
equal in power with the US. In fact, he grasped the significance
of America’s industrial and military power relative to the
exhausted state of Soviet Russia’s physical and human assets.
America’s industrial infrastructure was intact and developing
while its manpower losses were, in comparison with the tens of
millions of dead Soviets, negligible. But it is also clear that
Stalin also understood that the Soviet victory on the Eastern
Front was indispensable to the defeat of Hitler in Europe. The
USSR could thus expect the US and Britain to not only seal the
victory over Hitlerian fascism but, given the disproportionate
Soviet contribution to that victory, to propose post-war
concessions either in terms of territory, development aid, or
both. The concessions Stalin asked for were proportional,
reasonable and are no example of an overplayed hand. A Soviet
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe was justified if only as a
security buffer to any potential future invasion of the USSR.
Moreover, almost all the occupied Eastern European countries
(Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Baltic states) were, to varying
degrees and for various reasons, allies of Hitler. Basing and
transit rights in the Turkish Straights and northern Iran were
small matters in comparison to the Soviet losses and decisive
victory over fascism at Stalingrad. These basing and transit
rights did not necessarily imply an expansionist aim. Further,
in terms of military power, these basing and transit rights were
insignificant in the face of overwhelming allied naval and
atomic power – after all, did not the US and Britain exclusively
control both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans? Stalin’s request
for small territorial concessions in China and some minor role
in the occupation of Japan were not unreasonable in view of the
fact that Stalin was requested to send a major force to fight
the Japanese in Manchuria – a request he incidentally honored.
Stalin’s request to keep Germany from ever again threatening the
USSR was a no-brainer because a militantly powerful Germany
would also threaten Western Europe, a major trading region for
the US. The industrial machinery Stalin extracted from occupied
Eastern Germany as war reparations were justifiable given the
unilateral Nazi aggression against Russia. Spoliation of the
defeated was not in 1945 illegal under international law. All
in all, the concessions granted to Stalin were less than one
might have reasonably expected in proportion to the Soviet
contribution to the defeat of fascism or of those due a "junior
partner". To conclude otherwise form the evidence warrants that
we ask ourselves about Professor Gaddis's ability to evaluate
questions of evidence.

With the
possible exception of the Berlin blockade Stalin did not
overreach - and he quickly recovered his sanity and backed off
from a possible nuclear confrontation over Berlin. Stalin did
consolidate his power in Eastern Europe -- in the face of US
pressure applied through NATO, the Marshall Plan and the Truman
Doctrine but he did so on a defensive basis after the US and
Great Britain had commenced in no uncertain terms, to stir up
opposition in the Soviet's Eastern European sphere of influence.

Vladislav
Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov

Zubok and
Pleshakov make an unfortunate contribution to the case, blaming
Stalin for setting off the Cold War. For them, Stalin was a
psychopath, a monster whose murderous ways would have been
projected onto the world stage unless he was restrained by
Truman.[16]
They make vague references to Stalin's criminality and
blood-letting in repressing real or imagined internal
dissidents, eliminating opponents inside the Party, setting up
brutal police states in Eastern Europe. Certainly, Stalin was
brutal -- but no more so than friends and opponents around him.
Also, it has been shown that Stalin loathed most of the
communist leaders in the satellite countries and repeatedly
requested them to soften their repressive tactics, which Stalin
believed would undermine the legitimacy of their regimes. Stalin
has been the poster-child for evil for those who, like Professor
Gaddis, want to deflect scrutiny from US conduct in the Cold War
and its subsequent efforts to eliminate the USSR as its rival.
Zubok and Pleshakov's entry into the fray as supporters of a
Gaddis style narrative are compromised by their finding that
Stalin entertained no master plan for expansion beyond the
ambition to "merely" hold together the territories liberated by
the USSR from fascism, territories which had often been part of
Tsarist Russia or traditionally within the sphere of interests
of great (imperial) Russia. Stalin wanted to control these
regions if only in order to have a strategic buffer in the West
to thwart any future fascist invasion of the USSR.[17]
If there was no master plan for Soviet global
conquest/liberation then the door is opened for a more
impartial, if not charitable, accounting of the facts.

Arnold
Offner and Melvyn Leffler

Like
a Gaddis, Professor Offner concludes that the changed ratio of
power between the US and the USSR after the US came to possess
atomic bombs justified Truman downsizing the spoils of war
promised by President Roosevelt to Stalin - such is the routine
practice in statecraft when a promise made under one set of
circumstances is abrogated because changes allow for better
terms. In this spirit, Truman's Secretary of State, James
Byrnes, pushed his counterpart, V.I. Molotov, to give up on most
territorial gains in China and Japan as well as in Turkey and
Iran. At the 1945 Moscow Foreign Minister's Conference, Truman
and Byrnes had not yet decided to pressure Stalin and Molotov to
loosen their control in Eastern Europe but they were adamant in
withdrawing other concessions previously offered or suggested by
President Roosevelt. It seems, according to Offner, that Stalin,
the astute power politician, understood that the atomic bomb had
given the Americans extra leverage in getting their way in
Moscow (1945) and would continue to do so as long as that
asymmetric power advantage held. Thus, Stalin seems to have
reluctantly accepted the changed terms Byrnes put on the table.
That Stalin did so without too much alarm proves that Stalin was
a hard-headed realist and not the Marxist-Leninist ideologue
found in the Gaddis narrative.[18]

Gaddis views
the relations between the US and the USSR as that between
implacable foes, one of which -- the USSR -- being motivated by
an overriding interest to expand. For Professor Gaddis, the
history of the Cold War is the unfolding of a struggle between
good and evil and, despite a dearth of evidence, Gaddis avows he
knows the identity of the devil. Offner sees both Truman and
Stalin and their respective nations as flawed, but able to
interact in good faith and hence capable of establishing
sufficient trust and cooperation to guarantee normal relations.
Such trust and cooperation was moreover attainable during and
after a period of reappraisal of previous negotiated positions.
In fact, Offner concludes that Truman's perspective was more
flawed than Stalin's because Truman pressed his advantage too
far.[19]
Being somewhat inexperienced in statecraft, and partisan
politics, Truman's vision for collaborative possibilities
between the US and USSR was narrow and overly domineering.
Consequently, he adopted tactics which would inevitably
(intentionally?) strain Stalin's sense of fair play that. He did
this after 1946 in an attempt to force Stalin to loosen his grip
on Eastern Europe. He also did this by back-pedaling on prior
promises to prevent another German military build-up via a
policy of permanent German de-industrialization and disarmament.
While Offner's Stalin was a realist who understood that Truman's
atomic "ace in the hole" entitled him to bargain far better
terms than had been previously agreed, he intuitively knew that
if he did not hold the line regarding Eastern Europe and Germany
then the USSR's vital interest would not be taken seriously in
the future negotiations. Stalin did not want to be marginalized
like Great Britain, whose power Truman and his advisors scoffed
at for having been mis-spent.

Truman, on
the other hand, according to Offner, was drunk with new found
(nuclear) power and chose, contrary to the advice of some of his
closest advisers, including Byrnes, Stimson and Acheson, to
press for further concessions from Stalin.[20]
He was determined to have Stalin back down in Eastern Europe and
also accede to the re-industrialization of Germany - a direct
contravention of wartime agreements and a provocation by any
standard of fairness. When Stalin held firm on Eastern Europe,
Truman made a fateful decision, according to Offner: he stepped
up the pressure by adopting the religious-nationalist rhetoric
being promoted in Washington by Secretary of Navy Forrestal and
by an obscure foreign service officer stationed in Moscow,
George Kennan.[21]
Recklessly lacing his Truman doctrine speeches of 1947 with
slogans borrowed from Kennan and Forrestal's ideological
manifesto detailing why the Soviet Union could not be trusted,
Truman's pronouncements could be justifiably considered as a
"call to arms" to stop the spread of Soviet communism in Europe.
Indeed, such had been urged in Churchill's “iron curtain” speech
-- a phrase, incidentally, first used by Nazis.[22]
Truman's framing of US-Soviet relations in fundamentalist
religious and nationalist terms received a predictable combative
reaction from Stalin -- who hunkered down in Germany and Eastern
Europe and began a military build up in order to close the power
gap with the US. The overthrow of local regimes in Eastern
Europe entailed ruthless repression and also an increased use of
Marxist Leninist rhetoric to counter Truman's own expropriation
of the Forrestal-Kennan manifesto. But clearly Stalin's resort
to Marxist Leninist dogma was at the level of rhetoric, only,
for he made no moves threatening the new status quo although
Soviet armies vastly outnumbered US and British forces in Europe
and Stalin's spies in the US must have informed him that the US
arsenal of atomic bombs as of 1947 could not have been of
decisive military value. What is perfectly clear, to Offner, is
that Truman made fatal errors of judgement that precipitated the
slide into the Cold War.[23]

Professor
Leffler, too begins his narrative with Truman's recognition that
the atomic bomb had altered the ratio of power significantly in
favor of the US. But Leffler does not conclude that Truman's
religious-nationalist cognitive disorder (Offner) or that
Stalin's Marxist-Leninist dogmatism (Gaddis) created an
irreversible slide into the Cold War. According to Leffler, both
Truman and Stalin remained pragmatists regarding each other.
Stalin still understood that he was a “junior partner” and
Truman accepted Stalin as such -- though he was intent on
conveying to Stalin that he had been demoted to a probationary
status.[24]
He wanted Stalin to tow the line peddled by the US, just as
great Britain was learning to do. Leffler's Truman wanted to
one-up Stalin, but he also wanted to be on friendly terms. Thus,
according to Leffler, Truman vacillated between humiliating
Stalin and praising him.[25]
The circumstance which caused Truman to place more weight on the
humiliation side of the scale was a growing realization that
European reconstruction between the end of WWII and 1947 had
been an abject failure and that economic and political
instability opened opportunities for the USSR to exploit to its
advantage.[26]
Leffler cites an increase in communistic agitation and growth in
the popularity and membership of communist parties in Western
Europe as facts which could have major consequences for causing
a shift in the balance of power between the US and the USSR.
Truman's concern regarding an economic collapse and a subsequent
political vacuum as being reported to him by his national
security advisers tipped his not so refined political instincts
in favor of vilifying Stalin and the USSR in terms the latter
could only interpret as objectionable, going beyond the line of
fair play. Truman, however, had willfully decided not only to
use denunciatory rhetoric but also to institute aggressive
policies (NATO, the Marshall plan) which could be reasonably
construed as having hostile intent. NATO was a military
alliance of Western Europe and the US and was directed by the
US. Its claim to be purely defensive was undermined when US
nuclear weapons were positioned into Western European countries
and placed under the command of the US military. NATO's
militaristic intent to intimidate was further reinforced in
Stalin's mind when the future West Germany was not excluded from
membership in NATO. The cold war was the consequence.

Leffer makes
a strange case regarding Truman's recourse to these provocative
policies when he suggests that Stalin could have viewed them in
the framework of power politics and hence responded
pragmatically instead of relying on Marxist-Leninist dogma as
the lens through which to interpret Truman's actions. Stalin's
lack of a pragmatic response, Leffler seems to suggest, is the
event that confirmed for Truman Stalin's true aims of world
domination.[27]
Such a claim or conclusion turns a blind eye to the fact that
Truman, as Offner has suggested, could have chosen to reject the
religious-nationalist ideology proposed by James Forrestal and
George Kennan. Evidence indicates he may have adopted it in
order to pre-empt accusations by powerful Republican senators
that he was soft on Stalin and hence an appeaser like
Chamberlain. The latter criticism was resonating with the
American public during the mid-term election campaigns of 1946.
However, Leffler describes Truman as pragmatic; a pragmatic
politician would have been able to effectively distinguish
between rhetoric and reality. Truman did not in fact make that
distinction. Stalin, by way of contrast, was not reasoning
erroneously when he concluded that Truman had chosen a path of
implacable hostility -- he had! Truman's hostility was
reinforced by his religious-nationalist ideology. Truman's
ideology, in turn, confused Stalin with Trotsky, (wrongly).
Trotsky was (in fact) a deluded true believer. Stalin in
contrast was a realistic pragmatist. Truman was wrong when he
attributed Stalin's ruthless repression in Eastern Europe as
proof of Stalin's supposed unlimited ambition to spread Soviet
communism. All it proved was that Stalin clamped down when he
realized that Truman was openly committed to overturning
assurance that the US would never allow Germany to
reindustrialize or again send its armies through Eastern Europe
to attack Soviet Russia.

Neither
Offner or Leffler offer a narrative that effectively account for
the sudden shift after 1947 to policies regarding the USSR which
caused a seemingly irreversible drift into what became known as
the Cold War. When Winston Churchill made his infamous "Iron
Curtain" speech of 1946, comparing the USSR with Nazi Germany
only one year after the defeat of the genocidal fascists, Truman
wisely did not indicate support for the hard line taken by
Churchill echoing the dark fascist past and practically
calculated to heat up a US-USSR rivalry to the benefit of
Britain. What happened then in 1947 and 1948 to draw Truman into
Churchill's fearful confrontational world? Why did Truman feel
compelled to invoke the “fire and brimstone” imagery and
rhetoric and direct that against Stalin? Offner concludes that
Truman's intellectual capacity wasn't up to par -- he was unable
to accurately and judiciously assess the bargaining
possibilities and relationship of the US and USSR; mainly,
Truman failed to understand that overplaying his hand and
forcing his former ally into a corner would only make matters
worse. Leffler's reasoning on this riddle(?) falls apart
altogether as he seems to suggest that Stalin should have known
better than to fall back on Marxist-Leninist dogma to interpret
Truman's actions. For Gaddis, there is no problem because
zero-sum rivalry between the US and USSR was implicit given the
clash of incompatible national and ideological ambitions and
presumptions. Both Leffner's and Offner's analyses hint at a
solution when they conclude that Truman fell hostage to the
"fire and brimstone" rhetoric he lifted form the Kennan
ideology. But Leffler and Offner gleaned only part of the truth
of what really happened. Hogan provides the rest of the story.

Michael
Hogan

According
to Hogan, Truman's political instincts were not necessarily
deficient. He did not want a policy amounting to an all out
effort to rearm and instructed his new Secretary of State
General George Marhsall to reign in the overly ambitious
appropriation requests of the Joint Chiefs. Truman and Marshall
according to Hogan favored just enough spending to effectively
demonstrate to the USSR that they were serious about containing
Soviet ambitions in Europe -- as they perceived it -- and not
one penny more.[28]
They did not want to provoke an aggressive response from Stalin
and believed that their actions would not be construed by Stalin
as being excessive given the power ratio between the US and
USSR. Truman's "moderation" resulted in a near-mutiny among the
Joint Chiefs who undertook an effort to deal independently with
members of Congress.[29]
Hogan suggests that if not for General Marshall's support for
the President's cautious approach to dealing with Stalin by not
allowing US military appropriations to reach alarming levels, a
major blow up could have occurred in 1947.

What tipped
the battle over military appropriations in favor of the
extremist position of the military (and their civilian national
security allies like Clark Clifford, Paul Nitze and Kennan) was
the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948 where
non-communist leaders were brutally eliminated and replaced with
men hand-picked by Stalin.[30]
The military and civilian proponents of an unprecedented arms
build up prevailed over resistance from Truman and Republican
senators. The latter's position on appropriations had been
determined by concerns about federal spending and military
encroachment into civilian affairs. Anti Soviet hysteria dressed
in the denunciatory rhetoric of an American crusade against evil
Soviet Communism found in the Kennan-Forrestal ideology stirred
up national passions which carried the day. Republican Senators
like Taft and Vandenberg chose to reverse their traditional
hostility for large budgets because they allowed themselves to
be convinced that spending profusely on military mobilization
was preferable to either not spending or approving allocations
for New Deal programs. According to Hogan, the military and
civilian agents for unprecedented war mobilization should share
the blame for this capitulation, not Truman, who tried to
prevent it! And by implication, Stalin should receive little if
any opprobrium from historians. The USSR was neither destined by
Marxist-Leninist ideology or by self appointment to become an
implacable foe of the US.

George
Kennan's years in retirement were spent in trying to absolve
himself from affiliation with the Cold War ideology his Mr. X
memorandum created. He came to realize that its
overstatements and mis-statements regarding the USSR's positions
were used for the end of pursuing policies resulting in
de-stabilizing the post-World War II peace. Kennan would have
preferred a policy toward the USSR based on realistic
assumptions about Stalin's power and behavior as judged by an
objective assessment of the evidence.

Conclusions:

This work has
presented the ideas in ascending order of intellectual rigor. We
started with the least accurate analysis, the one which however
carried the day in 1948 – simplicissimus, Stalin as an ideologue
and a global menace aiming at world domination. The perception
of the relationship between Stalin and Truman by Western
scholars over time has become more and more refined and more and
more accurate to conclude with what can be seen as today's
basically accurate picture. Stalin, constrained and then
cornered, fought hard and rationally just to maintain those
concessions which had been promised to him and the Soviet people
for their blood sacrifices in World War II. He had no visions of
global domination, just an aim of Soviet self preservation.
Truman, likewise constrained by domestic economic and
ideological pressures -- the religious and nationalist
dogmatists as well as the militarist industrialists -- took up
policies to press home the unexpected nuclear advantage which
the US acquired after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Meanwhile,
Churchill, ever on the periphery, perceptively strove to improve
the terribly marginalized position of the former British Empire,
an empire Hitler correctly predicted would be destroyed by the
war in Europe. Churchill and his Home Office did this by
attempting to play off the US and USSR against each other
whether in Iran, Greece or Berlin. Rather than see the conflict
in simplistic binary terms of an ideological zero sum conflict,
this paper has argued for a more balanced and nuanced
perspective. Both Truman and Stalin, though cognitively flawed,
could often penetrate to the core of a complex situation and
both at times sincerely desired to collaborate with each other.
But, in the end, their clarity of mind failed them during
crucial tests. Truman, for his part, was more ideological than
Stalin and overplayed the U.S. position. This in turn brought
out responses from Stalin which added more fuel to already
overheated passions. The lessons for contemporary policy makers
are implicit: to see Putin's Russia as ideologically driven and
determined is almost certainly inaccurate. To see “the West” as
a monolithic actor with a universal ideology and appeal is
likewise overly simplistic. Prudent action and reaction in
international relations requires realistic appraisals of
partners and opponents. Just as the US misapprehended Stalin, in
a position of absolute global domination, the US today, in a
much weaker position likewise misapprehends a rising Russia. But
those ideas are for another work at another date.

[1]
John Kadar: Ph.D. New School for Social Research taught
political science at State University of New York
(Cortland).